IT Costing

To make the right business decision on millions of dollars of IT spending, you must truly understand the total cost of operation/ownership and unit costs of any IT service. This seems obvious, but the underlying cost drivers are extremely complicated.

IT services like email, business applications, smartphone support, video conferencing, etc., need a logical cost model that maps all of the underlying cost drivers to IT services while applying the appropriate allocation rules to the shared costs. For example, in a business application such as customer relationship management (CRM), it is necessary to include license costs, license maintenance, server maintenance, network, security, administration, consulting customization, security, overhead, and more. Furthermore, each of these line items can have its own underlying cost drivers. IT costing can get very complicated, very fast — especially when done manually or using Excel or Access.

Automatically Allocate Costs and Map IT Services to Cost Drivers

Digital Fuel's IT Financial Management (ITFM) IT Costing is a SaaS business application that easily maps the connections between IT services or capabilities and their underlying cost drivers — technical services, assets, projects, human resources, and more. Allocation rules are automatically applied allowing you to simply run expense data through the model to easily calculate TCO and unit costs for all IT services. Digital Fuel's unique patented engine automatically uploads expense, usage, and asset data, while mapping it to relevant services and cost model objects. The application routinely cleanses the data to make sure results are valid.

In addition, IT Costing enables you to perform usage-based allocations of any shared service, including cloud-based services, in a systematic and auditable manner as required by tax and regulatory compliance.

The Value of IT Costing

Get enhanced visibility to lower IT costs
Gain predictability into IT spending
Enable accurate fact-based planning
Create a systematic audit trail for tax and regulation compliance
Automate error-prone and timely manual efforts

Key Capabilities

Build and manage IT cost models
Apply and manage allocation rules
Use the library of cost models and allocation rules
Track TCO, and its breakdown, trend, benchmark, as well as efficiency ratios such as percentage of budget or revenue and cost per capita and SLA
Track unit cost, and its breakdown, trend, benchmark, and SLA
Easily upload expense and usage data
Automatically map data to services, organizations, and other cost model objects
Automatically identify data quality issues and fix
Review data upload, cleansing, and mapping status
Assess model health